Morgoth

This monday's art challenge completely sucks. Turkeys...I mean, c'mon? I want you to draw PNJ/PG art!

In 16372 years, we'll live under the surface and nourish each other from our fleas! HAHA!

Good job! No go and continue drinking alcohol!

Well, the situation's lot more complex, though. But I understand where you're coming from. The American understanding of War is just to flex the muscles and then leave everything else in ****.

SecuROM? Pft. Easy as pancake! You just have to look at the right place for the right thing and all annoyance shall end immediately.

Have you all gone nuts or what? Please stay on-topic!

No no Noo NOOO! Not entirely "bashed and kicked", it just lacks some.... creativity. You should replace "dark Goddess, evil chosen whatever stuff" with "Happy Flowers", "Japanese War mechs" or "Marmorkuchen", and you'll see, everything starts making sense. Trust me. PS: That Marmorkuchen bit is just some suggestion from my Grandma. She promises to vote for your module if you mention at least Marmorkuchen once. Yes, yes.....

Damn, I still don#t own NWN2. Too much to learn currently, so I've probably wait till the christams holidays till I get my paws onto the toolset. Hihi!

Well that's something. Don't forget the giant evil Paprika-Warriors who want to take over the whole galaxy!

"...dark, runed dagger." "...Edwin Darkshard -former DEAD Red Wizard" "...follower and Chosen of the Goddess of Darkness" etc. Oh boy, that sounds way too corny... therefor you may land a job at Bio! ) Seriously. Are there also NWN/2 mods out there or in the plan that are not related to DnD, Swordcosts or generally fantasy stuff? How about a cool SciFi Drama? Massive Drama Effect! Teh new Epic SciFi mod for NWN2, from Morgoth Industries, Inc.

I guess PG will be developed for consoles in mind, later ported to the PC. A'la Condemned I guess. I really really hope they soon will start to leak some more infos, no matter whether PNJ or PG.

It's all about how effective you implement it. DA is gonna have a tactical RPG combat system, and if done well, I'M gonna enjoy it. Deus Ex and Bloodlines were fine too, I just hate games based on a ruleset and then add this action-layer on it. Kotor was based on d20 Modern? So what? Nobody cared, you just clicked and watched. Looking at the ME video, it seems Bio makes the same failure again: Adding stats and skills and feats and whatever just for the sake that the so called RPG fans shut up, but then turning it into this unchallenging arcade-style shoot-em-up fest. As I said, I love good action, but then it should be done properly.

That video was lame. And why did this huge machine-creature-thingy just stood there, awaiting teh blaster shots? It should move and bring the player to sweat. Combat looks not very challenging. Bio should either do a proper FPS or a proper tactical RPG combat system. I don't like combining RPGs with action combat, just look what happened with Kotor.

I'm guessing you're talking about the cliff face with the texture stretching. I don't know how to avoid it while getting the sheer cliff I want. With hills that aren't so steep I can get it to look nicer, but then I lose the steep drop effect. With the grass, its just a paint tool, both for the base texture, and the actual 3d grass tufts. If you want, you can edit the pics with some arrows and text and stuff if you want to show me how to improve some stuff. I went to art school so criticism is welcome. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Ok, I've edited one picture, most of that stuff can also be applied to the others. Most of my complaints are devoted to the landscape and the vegetation. The stretching of the hills looks very unnatural (probably the toolset lacks the feature to edit UVs). Also use a different texture for the terrain, something tileable in order to avoid the patterns. If you don't know how to do that, you could send me the texture and I could make it tileable in ZBrush. Also use more vegetation like moss, weeds, bushes etc. around the river borders. With that you avoid the abrupt intersections between green and brown ground, and it makes sense to have more plants and stuff where water flows nearby. Otherwise, it looks very professionally so far. The buildings are placed naturally, not too tight, I also like that you rotate them here and there a little bit. The castledistrict looks awesome! Also make sure to place buildings, trees etc more often on different heights. A path mustn't need to have the same levitation, making a road or avenue going 10-15 degrees up/down adds much to the realism. I'm sure I'll have something to add when you get to the lighting process.

Those screens look great Oerwinde! Although you should check out the UVs of the terrain, it looks like they're over-stretching a little bit. Also make sure to keep the vegetation realistic. I.e. the grass shouldn't flow in some strange patterns on the top of the hill, then vanish again. I know within the UnrealEditor I could place a TerrainActor, specify some properties and then use several layers of textures, with alpha channels to determine where grass should be applied and where not. Is that also possible within NWN2?

Well I guess it helps the programmers to reduce the complexity to implement features, since many things are already standardized with .NET. This of course also means less efficiency. But efficiency costs expertise and time, something programmers not always have.

What potential improvement in tech me really interests is improvisational gameplay, adding a certain layer of unpredictability. That's what really excites me. I'm sure Bioshock is gonna be the king in that regard!

Well currently it's all about getting better with graphics, wrting the code more efficiently to improve framerates and make the (art) tools more efficient. After photorealism is reached (if that is the goal), the industry will move on to get deeper with the content. Of course there're already companies like Valve that worry about multi-core solutions to create more interesting gameplay, but you need to convince the big boys like MS and Sony to make the push.

I heard Ico, Okami and FF12 are also must-haves for PS2 owners.

Well I don't do it. I'm just too impatient and arrogant to spend another few minutes after installation to give teh publisher "valuable" infos.

Left-click with your mouse here! The question is will that technological race ever end? In Hollywood, you can now basically create everything with CGI.... for not very long. Since 5 years? I mean everything perfectly, not just "Looks good, but something's lacking". Doesn't mean we get better movies. With games on the other hand, you have at least more elements (not just the visuals) that make the experience more exciting. AI in particular. Although nobody seems to make endeavours to pursue that direction. Graphics still sell better than smart NPCs, after all. I'm wondering what Obsidian's two UE3-powered games (PNJ, PG) will have in stores for us. Yay or nay for us Obsidian fanboys? Even with the superior tools Unrealtech offers, will that also mean the game content will be superior?

"This surely must be a Democrat!"

From the Autodesk homepage:

Iirc, Maya isn't supported. I have a faint memory of someone saying that 3DStudio Max may get support through a plugin or somesuch in the future, but I can't say for sure. According to the manual (the one in the documentations folder, not the actual manual) it's C-based. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Well I think since Obsidian used 3ds max, it's a no-brainer. I read sometime ago the toolset doesn't support skinned (i.e. animated) models, is that right? No chance to create custom animations? Btw, I could maybe always export the art into Gmax (it's still for free I presume?) and then bring it from there into the toolset via plugin, if Gmax can read the plugin that is.

Oh well, since I'm sitting here in a toolset thread: Could you hardcore NWN-modders tell uncle Morgoth what a 2DA and a Hakpak is? Since those are the most common terms I've heard in the last 4 years of NWN's modding lifetime.... :D